Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Lull!” Aj shouts and leaps down the steep, slippery ghats, skidding on the stone, hurdling bundles of luggage, sending children reeling, leaping over low walls and platforms where the Brahmins commemorate the ten-horse sacrifice of Brahma with fire and salt, music and prasad. “Lull!”

With a thought Mr. Nandha banishes his gods and demons. He has it now. It cannot escape into the city. The river is closed to it, Mr. Nandha is behind it, there is no way but forward. The people sweep away from him like a sea parting in some alien religious myth. He can see the aeai. It is dressed in grey, drab machine grey, so easy to spot, so simple an identification.

“Stop,” says Mr. Nandha softly. “You are under arrest. I am a law enforcement officer, stop at once and lie flat on the ground.”

There is clear open space between him and the aeai. And Mr. Nandha can see that it will not stop, that it knows what the law demands of it and that in defiance is its one, minuscule chance of survival. Mr. Nandha clicks off his gun safeties. The Indra avatar system swings his outstretched arm on to the target. Then his right thumb performs an action it has never taken before. It switches the gun from the lower barrel, that kills machines, to the upper. The mechanism slides into position with a silken click.

Run. It is such a simple word, when your lungs are not clenched tight like fists for every breath, when the crowd does not resist your every lunge and shove and push and elbow, when one single, treacherous slip will send you plunging to annihilation under the feet of the crowd, when the man who might save you is not at the geometrical furthest point of the universe.

Run. It is such a simple word for a machine.

Mr. Nandha slides to a stop on the treacherous, foot-polished stone, gun levelled. He could no more remove his aim from the target than he could shift the sun from its centre. Indra will not permit it. His outstretched arm, his shoulders ache.

“In the name of the Ministry, I order you to stop!” he cries.

Useless, as it ever was. He forms the intention. Indra fires. The crowd screams.

The munition is a medium-velocity liquid tungsten round that, rifled by the barrel of Mr. Nandha’s gun, expands in flight into a spinning disc of hot metal the size of a circled thumb and finger, an okay sign. It takes Aj in the middle of the lower back, tearing through spine, kidneys, ovaries, and small intestine in a spray of liquidised flesh. The front of her sleeveless grey cotton top explodes outwards in a rain of blood. The impact lifts her off her feet and throws her, arms and legs splayed out, forward on to the crowd. The ghat people scramble out from under her. She falls hard to the marble. The impact, the trauma should have killed her—the bottom half of her body is severed from the top—but she writhes and claws at the marble in a spreading pool of warm sweet blood, making small soft shrieking noises.

Mr. Nandha sighs and walks up to her. He shakes his head. Is he never to be allowed dignity? “Stand back please,” Mr. Nandha orders. He stands over Aj, feet apart. Indra levels the gun. “This is a routine excommunication but I would advise you to look away now,” he tells the public. He glances up at his crowd. His eyes meet blue eyes, Western eyes, a Western face, bearded, a face he recognises. A face he seeks. Thomas Lull. Mr. Nandha bows infinitesimally to him. The gun fires. The second round takes Aj in the back of the head.

Thomas Lull roars incoherently. Lisa Durnau is by him, holding him, pulling him back, clinging to him with all her athletic strength and weight and history. There is a sound in her ears like a universe ending. Tracks of terrible heat on her face are tears. And still the rain beats clown.

Mr. Nandha senses his warriors at his back. He turns to them. For now he does not need to register the expressions on their faces. He indicates Thomas Lull and the Western woman holding him back in her arms.

“Have these people arrested under offences against the Artificial Intelligence Registry and Licensing Act,” he commands. “Deploy all units immediately to Ray Power Research and Development Unit at the University of Varanasi. And have someone take care of this.”

He holsters the gun. Mr. Nandha very much hopes he will not have to use it again this day.

Look out the left , the captain says. That’s Annapurna, and the next one down is Manaslu. After that Shishapangma. All of them over eight thousand metres. If you’re on the left side of the plane, I’ll give you a call as we come in, on good days you can see Sagarmath; that’s our name for Everest .

Tal is curled up in the wide business class seat, head on the cushion on the armrest, asleep and giving little soprano snores though it’s only a forty minute flight from Varanasi. Najia can hear the treble beats from yts headphones. Soundtrack for everything. HIMALAYA MIX. She leans over yt to peer out the window. The little cityhopper skips in over Ganga plain and the flatlands of the Nepal Terai then takes a big jump over the river-riven foothills that guard Kathmandu. Beyond them like a surf-line breaking at the edge of the world, is the High Himalaya, vast and white and higher than she could ever dream, the loftiest peaks streaked with torn cloud running on the jet stream. Higher, and further; summit beyond summit beyond summit, the white of the glaciers and high places and the flecked grey of the valleys blurring into blue at the furthest edge of her vision, like a stone ocean. Najia can see no limit to it in any direction.

Her heart leaps. There is something in her throat she cannot swallow. There are tears in her eyes.

She remembers this scene from Lal Darfan’s elephant pagoda, but those mountains had not the power to touch, to move, to inspire. They had been folds of fractals and digits, two imaginary landmasses colliding with each other. And Lal Darfan had also been N. K. Jivanjee had also been the Gen Three aeai, as the eastern extremities of these mountains had been those peaks she had seen over the wall around that garden in Kabul. She knows the image the Gen Three had shown her of her father as torturer had been false; she had never walked down that corridor, to that room, to that woman who in all probability had never existed. But she does not doubt that others did, that others had been strapped to that table to scream out how they endangered the establishment. And she does not doubt that that image will now forever be her memory. Memory is what I am made of, the aeai had said. Memories make our selves, we make memories for ourselves. She remembers another father, another Najia Askarzadah. She does not know how she is going to live with either. And the mountains are harsh and tall and cold and reach beyond any end she can see and she is high and alone in her leather business-class seat with the fifty-inch pitch.

She thinks now she knows why the aeai had shown her the childhood she had suppressed. It had not been cruel, it had not been even a ploy for time. It had been genuine, touching curiosity, an attempt by a djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.

Najia Askarzadah pulls her legs up on to her seat, lays her body down across Tal’s. She drapes her arm over yts, loosely takes yts fingers in hers. Tal starts with a half-syllable but she does not break yts sleep. Yts hand is delicate and hot; beneath her cheek she can feel yts ribs. Yt’s so light, so loosely put together, like a cat but she feels a cat’s toughness in the muscles breathing in, breathing out. She lies there, listening to yts heart. She thinks that maybe she has never met a braver person. Yt has always had to fight to be ytself and now yt goes into exile with no destination in sight.